Six of these billionaires, from Forbes’ list
of the world’s richest people, are American entrepreneurs: Microsoft
co-founder Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO Warren
Buffett, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Oracle co-founder Larry
Ellison, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Facebook founder
and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Rounding out the list are Carlos Slim, the
Mexican tycoon, and Amancio Ortega, the Spanish founder of a retail
conglomerate that includes clothing chain Zara. Together their net
wealth ― assets minus debts ― amounts to $426 billion.
We cannot name the bottom
half of humanity, more than 3.6 billion people, with that kind of
precision, but they mostly live in the developing world.
The Oxfam statistic is
one of the starkest ways to portray the disturbing rise of economic
inequality, which can be a hard concept to grasp when portrayed in
percentages and billion-dollar denominations. The global anti-poverty
group has been tracking inequality since 2014.
Worsening inequality
threatens to upend the very fabric that’s held democracies together in
the post-World War II global order. In the United States, the widening
gulf between the rich and everyone else helped propel Donald Trump into office. Overseas, the trend is credited with sparking Brexit, the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union.
“Left unchecked, growing
inequality threatens to pull our societies apart,” Oxfam writes in its
report, citing Brexit, Trump’s campaign and “a worrying rise in racism
and the widespread disillusionment with mainstream politics.”
In 2016, the richest 1
percent of the world held slightly more than half of the wealth of the
entire planet, Oxfam notes. And the 1,810 billionaires on Forbes’s list ―
89 percent male ― hold $6.5 trillion, as much wealth as 70 percent of
humanity.
Put another way, billions of
people are fighting over crumbs from half of a pie, while the rich dig
into fat slices all to themselves.
For its analysis, Oxfam used Forbes’ ranking of global billionaires and wealth data from Credit Suisse.
According to the wealth data, 80 percent of the bottom half of the
world’s population are adults living in Africa and India. They’re
younger and more likely to be single and poorly educated. Women who are
poorly educated are even more likely to have very little wealth.
Also.....Growing inequality threatens to upend the very fabric that’s held democracies together in the post-World War II global order.
A very small sliver of the
bottom half live in the United States, mainly because the wealth data
looks at net wealth, subtracting the amount of debt a person has from
assets. That means, for example, that young adults in the U.S. who have a
big mortgage and maybe a car loan and a student loan will, on paper,
seem poor.
Some economics writers, Felix Salmon of Fusion most prominently, have used this point to discount Oxfam’s report. It’s a fair criticism, Gawain Kripke, Oxfam’s director of policy and research, told The Huffington Post. But it’s a footnote, not a reason to dismiss the disturbing findings of the report, Kripke said.
If you ignore debt entirely, it would take 56 of the wealthiest
individuals to equal the wealth of the bottom 50 percent, according to
Oxfam’s report.
“The underlying trend is the
same: At the very pinnacle of the economic pyramid, rich people are
getting progressively and rapidly richer, while the rest of humanity is
muddling along,” Kripke said. He called the wealth of the top eight
individuals “biblical.”
Last year, when Oxfam did its report, it took 62 billionaires
to equal the bottom half of the world. The change this year seems
drastic because of improvements in the quality of the data Credit Suisse
was able to get. If Oxfam had used that improved data last year, it
would’ve taken just 9 billionaires to reach parity with the world’s
bottom half, Kripke said. (Number nine? Charles Koch.)
Partly
driving last year’s growing divide was the booming stock market, which
fed even more money to wealthy folks invested in the market. The rising
value of the dollar also contributed.
Trump,
whose political fortune has benefited from increasing economic
dissatisfaction, ranks 324 on the Forbes billionaires list ― tied with
“Star Wars” creator George Lucas. The president-elect has nominated the
wealthiest group in American history to his Cabinet. Combined, these
future public servants hold about $12 billion, according to a recent estimate from Bloomberg.
Neither Brexit nor Trump’s
policy proposals ― tax cuts, relaxed regulations, renegotiated trade
deals ― are viewed as offering a solution to the growing economic
disparity.
The
administration’s first major policy push ― repealing the Affordable
Care Act ― would take health insurance and other health protections away
from millions, while giving a tax cut to the richest Americans,
HuffPost’s Jonathan Cohn reported recently.
That’s a sure way to exacerbate income inequality.
Rising inequality causes more than a sense of moral outrage and the election of reality TV stars. There’s a wide body of research
that shows inequality adversely affects the health of those at the
bottom, raising the risk of cardiovascular disease, increasing suicide
rates and shortening lifespans. Some attribute the rise in the death rate of white people and the heroin epidemic to inequality.
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